Ian Smith, perhaps better known as Harold Bishop from Neighbours, has revealed how playing the bumbling cafe owner for so long stopped him playing his dream rolls of either a vampire or a serial killer
Neighbours star Ian Smith regrets playing bumbling café owner Harold Bishop for decades as it stopped him taking dream roles of a vampire and serial killer.
The beloved soap opera regular, 86, who has played fussy Harold on the Aussie show since 1987, poignantly opened up about how it’s now “too late” to try for the sinister parts due to terminal cancer.
He said: “I had been on the show too long.
“I would love to play something outlandish, like a vampire or a serial killer.
“But all the people in casting today were brought up with Harold, one even told me that was the reason I was being typecast.”
Ian stressed he’s grateful for his Neighbours part due to the huge pay cheques and perks of working on a soap.
He added: “I saw so many good actors come and go but they always go.
“My father had instilled in me to never walk away from money and the money was very good. To be in work, I learned, is a privileged position and to be in permanent work, with holidays for Christmas, is fantastic.”
Despite his regret over not landing parts as a bloodsucker or Harold Shipman-style murderer, Ian’s Harold character has enjoyed some of the soap’s most dramatic storylines.
During his appearances in more than 2,100 episodes across 50 years, he was famously swept out to sea, leaving only his glasses behind on a rock before making a comeback on the show five years later with no memory.
Harold also almost strangled a man to death and was hit with a stroke which temporarily turned him into a peeping tom.
His character has also survived cancer, car accidents and a heart attack.
In reality, Ian is putting a brave face on his own health fight.
The now shaven-headed actor said chemotherapy left him with an “awful half shaggy, half bald look” before he went with a buzz cut.
He added: “First time I’ve been bald since I was a baby.”
Ian announced his lung cancer diagnosis last year, saying: “I found out a few months back that I have cancer… that I have a very aggressive non-fixable cancer and they expect me to… they expect me to die.”
He’s suffering pulmonary pleomorphic carcinoma.
His doctor cried when he delivered the news and Ian collapsed.
He said the diagnosis made him start doing “very dramatic things”, such as “looking at every sunset” and “watching children play” when before he’d have wanted to have “killed them”.
The childless actor, whose wife Gail died in 2019, was told he would be dead by March.
But after chemotherapy and immunotherapy his doctor called him with the good news the two tumours that had been blazing red in his chest on scans had died down.
Ian said: “Dying does change how you live. I vainly say I am a better person now, but I think I am more forgiving, more understanding.
“It is a pity that I couldn’t have come to all these realisations before I was sick. I could have done somebody some good in the world.
“Apart from being 86, I feel good. I’m in no pain.
“I know I have cancer, because doctors keep telling me I have it. I may get very sick again one day. But I have lived the most privileged life.”
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Source: Celebrities - dailystar.co.uk
